Applied Excellence

As we know that Natural / Pure / Basic sciences define principles / develop information to predict or understand a specific phenomenon occurring in the world and applied science is the discipline of science that applies this existing scientific knowledge to develop more practical applications, like technology or inventions. Physics is a pure science; however Applied Mechanics is the science which uses laws of physics for the applications to design structures and appliances. Multiple Applied sciences emerge based on the nature and area of application of principles of pure science. Continuing with example of Physics; the disciplines of optics, quantum physics, materials science, applied mechanics, nanotechnology, micro-fabrication, mechanical engineering, biophysics,  electrical engineering,  control theory, aerodynamics, energy, solid-state physics, etc. are all applied sciences emerging by applying specific principles of Physics in different areas.

Excellence is also kind of basic science, which can be applied to various aspects and provide us process or methodologies to be adopted in the specific areas. E.g. Baldrige Excellence Framework has been created by applying excellence principles to overall business performance. This framework coupled with methodologies, processes, measurement KPIs, etc. has emerged as one of the Applied Excellence Science called “Business Excellence”. Several corporations have taken cue from this and built their own global excellence frameworks to be followed creating a number of flavors of this.  Deming applied principles of excellence to product quality and defined 14 principles to be followed for achieving excellence in Product Quality which ultimately became a TQM movement still in practice. This is another example of Applied Excellence. Henry Ford applied the principles of excellence to assembly style of manufacturing giving rise to Manufacturing Excellence stream of thinking. There are several such examples of application of excellence principles to build a new science altogether.

I have made an attempt to apply some of the key principles and aspects of excellence to an Individual and define certain signs to identify if one is progressing on the path of excellence or not. The idea is to keep them simple to understand, simple to apply and simple to measure. Ideally one should be able to do it in “self-service” mode without any external intervention or help.  

First and foremost thing about excellence is, that it has a start point, which is when one realizes and takes up this journey consciously, but no end point. It is a continuous process of going to a better state / stage of performance level from where you are today in any aspect of life. When this aspect is applied to an individual, it means one needs to learn something new every day, one needs to do things better and better as the days pass, one needs to move forward in the achievement of current goal of excellence on daily basis. If one asks three simple questions to self before sleeping and answers them with honesty to oneself; one can provide a clue as to if he/she is on the journey of excellence or not; these are  

Have I done anything today to improve myself?

When we talk about an individual, it could be relationship with spouse / Children on personal side or Boss / Subordinate / Customer at work. or it could be reading a new technical article to improve your knowledge about specific technology or it could be doing some experiment to learn or it could be something as simple as complimenting someone for good work. The key here is to identify proactive actions which we have initiated and executed to seek an improvement in the desired area/s during the day. We might face a little trouble in the beginning to differentiate between proactive and reactive/ suggested actions but once we start getting hang of this, each action identified creates a positive feedback to us and pushes automatically to do more of these actions driving us ahead in the excellence journey.   

Have I done anything NEW today to improve myself?

This question is different than the first question. One word “NEW” differentiates both. We can do things which we have done in past again and again to improve the situation and we would be achieving some results. But it is important if we are trying something NEW which can give us different results and with a possibility of better / faster improvements. A person trying new things is positioned better to receive better and differentiated results than a person using the things which he / she has been using for many years. If you are taking certain actions again and again, you expect the similar results again and again and after a while the effectiveness of the actions and results starts diminishing. So, one needs to ask this question separately.

What I am going to do tomorrow to improve myself?

This question provokes oneself to do something new, different for improvement. It also allows oneself time to think about it in advance and assess if there is anything different one can try the next day for areas where one wants improvements or one has to continue what one is doing currently to ensure results. It also helps one to plan for the next day which is a key in getting things accomplished.

What is my SAY-DO ratio?

Last and most important question one needs to ask is what is their SAY-DO ratio? Many a times we make plans when we are thinking but are not able to act on the same as planed and do not realize that we are really not acting as we desired. Our SAY-DO ratio is poor. We realize this when some external source points out that results are not changing. Normally it is too late for any correction and we might have missed the bus. So it is important to consciously assess one self using this question which will help us to ensure that we do what we plan.

When we ask these 4 questions to oneself before sleeping, we apply some of the basic principles of Excellence and create a Applied version for improving Personal Excellence.  

Achieve Excellence by jumping from your Hamster Wheel

I was discussing with one of my friend in sales function and he was explaining me his secret sauce of his success in winning a deal. Since he was a close friend of mine, we were discussing various aspects and during discussions he mentioned that offlate, when he was trying for little bigger deals for improving his play and he was not able to win the deals using the same formula; he did everything that needs to be done which used to win him deals but he was not getting results, he was working like crazy but results were alluding him.

Many a time we also get in to such situation, where in we plan to do big things, make significant efforts in the manner we know and still do not achieve results. We came across same types of hurdles, we came across similar types of team members whom we need to teach the process from scratch and get them to speed, we get similar types of disagreements within the team, we get in to same type of last minute frenzy at every toll gate and many a times result does not show any co-relation with the efforts that we put in or the team size that we employ.

I have seen many people who move from one organization to another and miraculously they face same type of people everywhere and same type of interactions (+ve as well as –ve) and same types of reasons to make a decision to find another job. This cycle goes on, they really do not move upwards in the career through the jobs they undertake one after other.

All these people are on HAMSTER WHEEL of their own creation. The Secret Sauce for selling deals for my friend in sales function was his hamster wheel. It will allow him to win the deals only in that segment and whatever efforts he puts using the same sauce, they remain only as efforts and quantum of efforts does not have any relation with the results so even if he runs fast or for long duration, he remains at the same place. Same is the case with the project manager who gets in to same types of troubles in every project; the “Project Management Method” ingrained in to his mind is his hamster wheel and he is running on the same to get a predictable result with no improvements.

So if we are on our hamster wheel, we behave in the same manner every time; we do the things in exactly the same way again and again; and we typically get the same kind of results. We do not improve ourselves nor we deteriorate. We remain stationary. It does not allow us to improve our excellence levels. It actually deteriorates over a period of time and we realize it when the deterioration is significant. Result is we change job and try our luck at next. We really do not pay attention to our Hamster wheel; we actually are oblivious of the same so the cycle repeats.

So how do we check if we are on any sort of hamster wheel?

We can start asking some questions to oneself like Am I connecting with customer in the same manner as I used to connect a few years ago? Am I planning my projects in the same manner for a while? Do I conceptualize & build the presentations to customers or management in the same manner for some time? Do I delegate work to my team in the same manner for all my life? Do I review work of my subordinates in the same manner as I used to do two years ago? If the answer is yes, then you are on your hamster wheel and will need to dig deeper in to things like, have you been getting similar results or have you been observing a cyclical pattern in any of the areas to get a better clarity on your hamster wheel. Another easy way to put it across is IF YOU ARE COMFORTABLE IN YOUR JOB, YOU ARE ON YOUR HAMSTER WHEEL. Your comfort levels will not allow you to change or do things differently, thus you do not improve.

Once we get an understanding about our hamster wheel, the things become easier for us. We just need to jump from the hamster wheel, get in to doing things differently, experimenting with new things, take up new challenges beyond your comfort zone, learn new things and deploy the learning in to your work even though it might contradict your earlier beliefs. There are several ways to improve your excellence levels as explained in my earlier blogs on “Simplify for Excellence”, “Just Do it for Excellence”, “Questioning”, “Excellence through Say-Do ratio”. First step out from hamster wheel is the most difficult and most important step; once you take it, rest is simple.

Simple + Relevant = Excellence

We have been discussing a lot of things about excellence in this blog and trying to build a mechanism which can become a second nature for us to help ourselves become excellent in whatever we do. I have come across two more things that will help us in this transformation.

If one is trying to excel at something, it is critical that he/ she understands what it is completely and is able to define it in simple terms. He/she could remember even in sleep and does not have to refer to some powerpoint or some book or some notes stored in. This will also help in explaining the same to others easily to help them understand what you are trying to do and they too can remember these things themselves. It also becomes easy for one to assess if these simple things that one is trying to do are moving in the direction one wants and take the necessary course corrections. If you observe many successful people, you will observe that they follow this principle knowingly or unknowingly. Each one of them manage their operations with just 3 or 4 or 5 key parameters / strategies / thoughts which they will be able to remember every time and the organization can work around these 5 strategies and build the details. So the important thing to build excellence is make it SIMPLE – Simple to define, Simple to understand, Simple to monitor and Simple to do midway correction. Anything you initiate which required more than few bullet points to explain, will be difficult to achieve.

Now that we have been able to define what we want to do or what approach we want to take etc. in simple manner, it is necessary to keep all the activities true to what we have set to achieve. There are several actions we or our teams might initiate which may not be directly RELEVANT to the objectives and although these actions might be defined in a few simple bullets, it will not regally give the results we desire.

So Keep it Simple and Relevant to achieve anything in Excellent manner.

This looks very beaten down thought but try and observe yourself if you are really following this rule. You will find more times when you are not following than the times when you are following this rule and the results you achieved would tell you the story.

Ownership Quotient

As we know Excellence is the commitment one makes with one self to continuously do better than what one has done previously in the activities one performs in personal and professional life. The benchmark is oneself and it is continuously moving upwards. There is no end to reach final level of excellence. It is a journey and results depend on how one undertakes it.  In one of the previous articles in the blog, we saw how “Say-Do ratio” of a person affects the results one achieves in this journey. We also discussed about “Just Do it” mantra which helps in getting definite results. We also deliberated on “Allowing the people to perform” to achieve effective results. These are various tools and approaches which are available for usage in the journey of excellence.  However there is one critical thing which determines the quality of results i.e. what kind of ownership you have accorded to the actions when you have initiated them.

Whenever we talk about the excellence journey, it always involves assessment of certain aspects of oneself / organization and identify an intervention which, when implemented, will take oneself / organization to the higher level of excellence. Key here is effective implementation of the intervention. There is a possibility that you take certain actions because either you believe in them or it can be because your superiors believe in them or you might just want to be politically correct or something similar. Your ownership towards the need of specific action is different in each case and thus the effectiveness of the execution; which gives a specific result. It is seen that the ownership level of action is directly proportional to the results one achieve in this journey.

When you own certain decision / action, your commitment towards its successful implementation increases automatically and you try to find solutions to the problems anticipated during implementation in contrast to give reasons or finding rationale to say why certain hurdle can not be surpassed. The ownership level determines the attitude that you would be taking in performing any task that you set to do and higher the ownership more positive attitude you will adopt resulting in more effective results. So ask yourself, what is your “Ownership Quotient”; i.e. the ratio of key actions that you take with complete ownership to total number of key actions you take. Higher the ratio better will be effectiveness of your actions and you will be travelling at a good speed in the journey of excellence. We should mentally calculate our ratio and every time we find that it is coming down, it is time for us to look at how we are deciding the key actions that we take as intervention. 

Excellence - Innovation - Transformation

Excellence, Innovation and Transformation; these three words we hear everywhere irrespective of the forum we are attending. It can be somebody selling a new real estate project or it can be a start-up company trying to garner some funding or be it a political party talking about their plans for future of the nation or it can be just talking about a gel pen; these three words pop up in some shape or form almost everywhere. Are these just high sounding words used by copywriters to create differentiation or it has something more to it? Let us look little closer in to these three.

Excellence is the commitment one makes with one self to continuously do better than what one has done previously in the activities one performs in personal and professional life. The benchmark is oneself and it is continuously moving upwards. There is no end to reach final level of excellence. It is a journey which typically has view of only next milestone and remaining milestones emerge as we move forward. We have seen many corporations who have undertaken a journey from “manufacturers of shoddy products” to “icons of manufacturing products with highest quality” over a period of time. If one observes their journey closely then it becomes clear that when they started their journey, they had some idea of next state of quality of their products which they could visualize at that time and they devised different tools and methodologies to reach the level of quality they had envisaged at the start of journey. But by the time they reach this destination, the next level of Quality (next milestone) emerges and organization devises different tools / methodologies to reach this next milestone and the journey continues; it does not stop even when the organization is known as icon. 

An innovation is something original, new, and important in whatever field that breaks in to a market or society to create a new or better or faster or more effective way of doing things. Innovation could be in terms of development of new product or a new way to use the technology or a new / modified process but the ultimate aim is to do things in better manner; e.g. you implement a different customer engagement program (innovation) so that your satisfaction rating jumps from “Satisfactory” to “Delight”. In other words we can say that Innovation is an intervention with a clear focus on improving the level at which the organization / individual is operating. It surely is selected for implementation based on its potential to achieve the desired change and multiple innovations are deployed by any organization in multiple areas at different times in tune with the improvement desired. As we know the innovation can be either “incremental” which changes the organization in small bits without too much disturbance or it can be “disruptive” which brings in significant changes with big benefits. However one thing is certain that every innovation intervention acts as a booster rocket and takes organization to the next orbital level.

Oxford dictionary defines Transformation as “A marked change in form, nature or Appearance”. In the business parlance it means either organization has changed the way it operates and/or the processes it uses and/or the tools it adopts, to achieve its goals in more effective and efficient manner. We call the organization as transformed when the changes are significant to be noticed by outsiders. The organizations typically define the transformed state to be achieved and a journey is undertaken. Many a times there are interim milestones defined and achieved as they pass through the journey. Typically the transformation objectives are defined based on anticipated future needs of business and is expected to be valid for a period of time depending on the pace at which industry and technology are moving. So by the time organization is transformed to its desired state and becomes stable in this state, a need for new state arises and organization needs to assess and plan for next transformation. So Transformation is a journey where the organization moves from one state of operation to another better, effective and efficient state of operation (which is noticeable to external world) in a continuous manner.   

We see that there is a common thread of improvement / betterment runs through Excellence, Innovation and Transformation. The factors that are prominent in each of them are slightly different but ultimate motive is same. They might be different theoretically but when you use them in practice they run in parallel with significant overlap. The diagram below provides a glimpse of one such excellence journey in manufacturing 

I was trying to build a relationship between these three and came up with the following.

Excellence is a continuous journey which uses innovation as one of the vehicles to reach desired stations of one Transformation after another.

Excellence = Beyond the Obvious

I was discussing with a few of my friends and the expression “Beyond the Obvious” came in to discussion in some context. But after the discussion was over, the expression stuck in to my mind as a very simple yet effective description of Excellence. Excellence can be described as continuous process of doing better than the level at which you are doing a specific thing. If we perform at level at which we are expected to perform we are doing the obvious thing. When we incorporate things into our routines so that we showcase improvements and we reach next level of excellence. So when we go beyond the obvious, we are on path of improving excellence.

Let us check with a few real life examples

If you are meeting your SLAs with customer you are good but when you surpass SLAs and showcase different level of value adds to customer without incurring any additional cost, you have reached a new level of excellence and you will definitely see a positive vibes from customer. You are expected to deliver to SLA, which is obvious state, but when you go beyond, you see the difference.

I was in Tokyo for work and travelling in a taxi from hotel to Office. Unfortunately the driver took some wrong turn and he had to do some additional zig-zag to reach to the destination. We observed that he has missed the route but kept quiet as we were new to the country. After reaching the destination, the driver apologized for little detour that he had to take and reduced some money from the total bill. We were expecting a sorry from him being in Japan which was kind of obvious for us but the driver went beyond and we still remember him. He simply had raised the bar for himself.

We were supporting multiple applications of a customer and during discussions; we came to know that customer desperately needs a specific application to be developed but had no money to do the same. So the Project manager from our company took entire team in confidence and they all chipped in a few hours daily for a period of time and built the application without the knowledge of customer and presented the same to customer as a Christmas gift. Customer was so happy and overwhelmed with this nice gesture of going beyond the expectation of keeping the lights on for the applications where we were supporting. Customer not only paid for the efforts spent by the team, but always remembered this gesture.  The relationship with customer moved to a much higher level.

We can remember several such examples from one’s life which reinforces the thought that when one goes beyond what is expected from him / her individually or collectively; he / she reaches a new level of “expected” and in the process benefits immensely with the positive responses which are received during this process. This is nothing but raising one’s level of excellence.

So please look at what is expected from you at any given task / activity in the personal or professional sphere; try to go beyond and raise your level of excellence automatically.

Stay “Within the system” or “Break it” to improve the level of excellence in the Organization

When an organization decides to increase the level of excellence at which it operates, it becomes a tricky situation as to how to make it happen in all the relevant areas covering all the people involved and ensuring the sustenance of the new level achieved through vagaries of business. There are two high level approaches undertaken; one, staying within the system, i.e. to do a POC at smaller level and slowly adopt it in the remaining areas in systematic manner over a period of time and second one, breaking the system, i.e. change the whole system in one shot through some intervention and push it to the entire organization. There is a classic debate about correctness and effectiveness of each approach. The first approach is a collaborative approach which moves from lower middle level upwards and second approach is from top to bottom. It is also seen that there is no guarantee of success in any of the approach and there are almost equal number of successes and failures in each approach.

Let us take an example of “Six Sigma” framework, which is one of the frameworks used by many organizations to improve their excellence levels in delivering the defect free product. Since its origination in Motorola, we have seen that many many organizations have adopted this framework but only a few seem to have really benefitted at organization level and there is hardly any organization other than GE which could really raise its level of excellence significantly using this frame work. Do we know the reason for this? Will this reason solve our problem of “within the system” or “breaking the system”?

Let us look at this from a different angle; what happens when level of excellence at which the organization is operating moves from level A to level B (B being higher than A) ? first and foremost thing which happens is the organization starts performing at level B, the expectations from each unit and individuals match with the needs of performance at level B, the interactions within and outside the organization gets modified from supporting level A to level B, People behavior and HR policies are tweaked to support level B. In short the system which was operating in the organization when it is operating at level A is broken and completely new system supporting level B gets created. Once the system at level B is created and established in the organization successfully, the organization starts operating at level B. This gives us a clear clue as to why only GE was significantly successful than many other organization. GE was able to create awareness of Six Sigma at all the levels; it was able to create framework as to how to use Six Sigma within organization; it trained the employees at all levels in the framework, it also involved its suppliers to be part of this framework to raise the overall level of performance; it created dashboards which measured the improvement of performance at all levels and leaders like Jack Welch reviewed them on regular basis. Very clearly GE created a complete new system of operation for their expected level B of performance and implemented across the organization to reap the benefits. Many organizations who failed to create this level of change failed to reap benefits comparable with GE.

It is becoming clearer that when we move from level A of excellence to level B of excellence, we actually break all the systems which are operating at level A and create a set of new operating systems to support level B. It is now the question of how this journey to be traversed?.

I think that if any company follows any one approach then they will not have a success at the end of the journey but the organizations which use both the approaches in tandem, get the best results. First to decide what framework or system change that is required, a “within system” approach could be followed and various experiments could be done without changing anything in the broader organization wide systems. Once the decision is made regarding what change that will need to be made, a new paradigm for the new level of excellence need to be defined and announced. This is breaking the current system to move towards new operating model. This should be followed by again by systematic change in small chunks to reach the new paradigm in planned manner. The key in this systematic change is deep commitment of leadership for the new paradigm and their continuous involvement during the journey.  

EGO – Boon or Bane for Excellence

EGO is an interesting thing, and a lot has been written about the same. Many people have defined it in many ways. Plenty of suggestions / recommendations regarding the same are available. It has been described in books / discourses as old as few thousands of years to the most modern theories of our time. It is mentioned that Ego is kind of perception of self, felt by oneself. It provides you the necessary strength to state/do what you believe in and do not get intimidated by the other egos in the surrounding but if the person’s ego becomes big then it can drive him/her to ground. It is also seen that more and more you achieve success, your ego starts becoming bigger and bigger without you noticing it. Many a times it is seen that people do not like to work for/with a person with bloated ego. It is also seen in the organization that many of the so called debates on what strategies to be adopted, which solution should be selected, how a program to be structured, etc. is actually battle of egos of the stakeholder and typically egos find various avenues to showcase themselves to other egos and establish its supremacy over others. We can continue writing things about ego for pages and pages but it will not end, I want to examine how ego plays out when we talk about Excellence

As we know excellence is a continuous journey wherein we try to climb steps which take us to the higher level of excellence and there is absolutely no difference in personal and professional life. It simply means that we need to identify that we are now comfortable of performing certain activity at specific level of performance and then trigger our mental process to see what would be the next step on the ladder of excellence. It is extremely critical that we identify this state as early as possible and prevent getting in to the resistance barrier that is created by the Zone of Comfort. So how do we identify this stage at the earlier? Well, our ego comes in handy for this. When we feel that we are doing a specific activity comfortably and successfully, we start getting recognition from the external world in some form or other for the same. This recognition starts building up our ego and our ego starts growing. We need to observe ourselves, as soon as we consider ourselves as “experts” or “go to guys” for a specific type of activity, it is time to look beyond. It is time to look at the next step.

Ego can also be used to provoke us to take the next step. It is our ego, which typically helps us with an urge to do something better by looking at other egos surrounding it. Some one has said that you need to be with some one to become like that some one. There is a connotation that when you will be with this some one, you will observe that some one and imbibe the best practice observed in to you. I feel that in reality, it is our ego which continuously wants to become bigger and is always in search of ways and means to become bigger. So a bigger ego is identified in the form of someone like whom you want to become and our ego starts getting associated with it and see how it can become bigger through doing certain activities, acquiring some more skills, positions, etc.  So one needs to identify and examine this urge to become like some one at the earliest but keep a watch as to whether the ego is asking us to learn new things or prevent others from learning new things so that our ego remains intact. We need to ensure that our ego is pointing towards learning and positive things.

Ego can actually be very useful to push ourselves while we are climbing the excellence ladder. It being a perception of self, it actually can act like a positive spiral in our journey of excellence.  

The same ego can also create significant problems in the journey we have undertaken. We know that many a times, we need to “Unlearn” few things before we “Learn” few things required for our next level of excellence. The ego plays its part in facilitating this process in reverse manner. It normally prevents us from unlearning, it does not accept that what ever he was doing was not correct, which actually gets portrayed as weakness and ego kind of becomes small. Ego never likes to become small so it prevents us from really accepting “unlearning”. We see many times during the discussion that we kind of “agree in principle” but do not actually implement the change agreed. If we do not implement the new things, we do not move to the higher level of excellence and higher level of ego. So, many a times, ego directs us to do things which will reduce the surrounding egos. This is detrimental and starts a negative spiral in our journey of excellence.

We now come to question whether ego is boon or bane for excellence?

Although the paragraphs above have depicted that ego can play boon and bane with respect to excellence; I believe that it can be used as boon if we are able to identify our ego. Many a times we take actions, which we feel right but they actually are dictated by our ego. So as mentioned earlier, if we act based on things we “agree in principle but do not act” we will be able to move forward. We will also need to look at our actions, if they seem to be against the over all direction of entire operations, that is typically result of negative spiral run by our ego. So we need to be aware of this and stop those actions. So “Ego is boon for excellence if we keep it in control”.

“Just do it” for Excellence

As we know, excellence is a journey and we continuously move from one level of excellence to next higher level of excellence be it personal life or professional. It is a gradual process and each person or organization goes through the same individually. One needs to regularly analyse self and decide the next steps to be taken in order to move to the next level of excellence. The world surrounding us is continuously moving forward and if we do not take these steps then we actually move backwards. This is why we need to take those actions to keep pace with the world if not outstep. It is critical that we take these actions at the earliest to see the positive results of our movement.

If we look at this in a little different angle, we see that we want to move from one level of excellence to another level of excellence; we need to change something we do or manner in which we think or way in which we approach a particular thing. When we want to change something with oneself, we need to take that first step which requires all the courage we have, we need to shed the inhibition we feel about what others will say and take that first step. 90%+ population typically lie in dilemma whether to take the action or not. This is where the famous Nike tag line “Just Do It” comes in handy. Just Do it, said very simply and effectively, telling “take that action immediately without bothering about external world”.

There is another quote by Tony Robbins “A real decision is measured by the fact that you have taken a new action. If there is no action, you haven’t truly decided”. A very apt sentence; the surrounding world actually interprets our decision and its seriousness based on what actions we take. One can find the difference between what one talks and how one acts and if these two are matching, the change takes place. As said by CG Jung, “You are what you do, not what you say you will do”.

The major reason for not taking any action preventing the improvement in our level of excellence is our fear of failure or fear of reaction of the external world. That is the reason why we need courage to take that first action. Conrad Hilton has said “Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving, they make mistakes, but they don’t quit”. We need to bring that courage out to continuously push us to act and continue to act inspite of mistakes that we might make. We need to use the mistakes to learn more and act better. There is another shloka by Shri Samartha Ramdas Swami in Marathi

Kelyane hot ahe re | Adhi kelechi pahije ||

Yatna to dev janava | Antari dharita bare ||

Which means the action will give the results we want, but first we need to perform that act. Unless that action is taken we cannot see the results. Efforts to make these actions are key and need to be continuously undertaken.

If we look at this tendency of procrastination over taking the first step and resulting stagnation at same level of excellence for a long period; this quote by John F Kennedy provides answer and necessary push to look out for action the quote reads like “There are risks and costs to every action but they are far less than the long range risks of comfortable inaction”. The mental block which protests to change and tries to keep at the comfortable zone of current surroundings will lead us to stagnate at current level of excellence and over a period of time, we will actually move backwards as the world would have moved forward. Wayne Greteki says “You miss 100% of shots you don’t take” very simple and very powerful. Unless you take action, you will not see the improvement in the level of excellence so just to ensure that there is improvement, you need to take action. It is possible that you will get success in a few actions but atleast you will see a corresponding improvement. If we do not take any action, it is guaranteed that we will not see any improvement.

So it is extremely critical to take that first step at the earliest. Keep aside all the questions raised by your mind; if you have come to conclusion after analyzing the situation that certain actions are necessary to reach the new level of excellence, then JUST TAKE THOSE ACTIONS. You may want to split these actions in to several baby steps so that you can conjure the courage to execute those. See the results and encourage yourself to take some more actions. As Lao Tzu has said, “The Journey of thousand miles begins with a single step”; in this journey of improvement in the excellence level, you will need to train your mind to continuously identify these baby steps and executing them without any pressure. I am sure that success will be yours. 

Delivery Excellence on Auto Pilot

“Delivery Excellence” is the essential buzzword for every company. It becomes more prominent in the IT industry but also manifests in different format in other industries with industry specific definition of “Delivery”. Every organization is claiming to be working towards achieving Delivery excellence. There are multiple models built by various industry bodies, universities, governments like ISO, CMMi, Malcom Baldridge Award, Shingo Prize, etc. which are used by corporates to achieve and project delivery excellence to the external world. Many large corporations have built their own Delivery Excellence frameworks based on some of best practices of these models and their experience of delivering to customers. The whole idea of these initiatives is to build a framework within the organization which will help “auto-pilot” delivery excellence. The framework is a comprehensive set of Policies, Procedures, forms and templates which define what should be considerations while doing a specific work, how to do it, what are the tools available for doing the same and how to monitor its progress, etc. However, if one observes keenly across the spectrum of organizations, the aim of “auto-piloting Delivery Excellence” is not really seen to be successful. Corporations are not really able to achieve excellence, which is defines as “Excellence is the commitment one makes with one self to continuously do better than what one has done previously in the entire activities one performs on personal and professional life.  The benchmark is oneself and it is continuously moving upwards. There is not end as to final level of excellence”, in their delivery function. The corporates do not admit this but continuously refine the framework and do several other things to achieve the same. They set up a focus group to ensure that the organization continues to march on the “Excellence” path.

When one observes corporations / groups within the corporations who seem to be successful in achieving delivery excellence over a longer period of time and those who struggle or show intermittent success, we see a few points which make all the difference. These are  

1                     Has the team on the ground understood the Spirit of framework?

Many a times it is seen that a corporation has nice and comprehensive framework, it is available easily to every one to refer, there is a constant communication about need of its usage and team also uses it to the letter, there are no non conformity found in the audits but we do not see Delivery Excellence. The prime reason for this is the team does not understand the spirit behind each step in the framework. They really do not think deeply about why they are doing a specific step and what the business benefits are likely to be achieved by doing a specific step. The result is blindly following the steps mentioned in the manual. Over a period of time the team totally forgets why and just follows the framework to its letter. So it is critical for every organization to device means to ensure that the spirit of the delivery excellence framework is understood correctly by the team. This could be done by devising training programs which are more focused on deeper understanding and its relevance to business rather than overview. More and more case studies of benefits could be shared in discussion mode. The best method of keeping this journey of excellence perpetual is significant participation of senior and middle management.   

2                     Involvement of Senior and Middle Management

When an organization is building up a culture, then deep, convincing and demonstrated involvement of Senior management is mandatory. When organization observes keen interest and actions in specific tenets of culture or values demonstrated through actions; it starts adopting the same as their culture and their values. So it becomes critical that Senior management visibly demonstrate through their actions that they want a culture of delivery excellence in the organization. Many a times we see that Senior management sets the parameters predominantly on financial aspects, talk a lot about the same in various meetings, set up review process around it. There is not much of discussion on HOW portion of those achievements. The HOW aspects are directly linked with things like Delivery Excellence, which are vehicles to achieve financial goals. Clear and visible interest in these in terms of setting goals for their direct reports and reviewing of the same in meetings sets the right tone. When Senior management connects the comprehensive framework which has been built by the organization to business goals the cascade effect is a positive spiral. Taking cue from the senior management team, the middle management is critical in terms of implementation of this values system and if organization sees sincerity in the actions, their belief in what senior management is preaching strengthens. Is the middle management allowing the team to go through the full life cycle of any activity or they are looking for some shortcuts from the team. This speaks volumes to the team about real value system. Thus the joint effort helps in converting the delivery excellence framework to auto pilot mode. Simple things like how the middle management or senior management reacts to the mistakes made as well as defects conveys a lot to the organization in terms of what values the organization really cares for.  

3                     How defects and defect generator is treated? 

It is critical for success of any framework that there is an encouragement to make mistakes, learn from them and improve continuously. If the defects are not treated well and defect generator is punished without giving opportunity to improve or actions are taken on personal basis rather than on issue basis; the tendency to hide the mistakes increases also culture of “Passing the Buck” or “Save Ones Back” takes front stage. This encourages team to play safe and follow the framework to the letter (not to spirit). Also many a times defect finder is not considered a good team member by the team, which slowly gives rise to a culture of “I scratch your back and you scratch mine” i.e. “I will find nominal mistakes in your work and you find nominal mistakes from my work”. So the process is followed, there are defects, there will be some Root Cause Analysis, some actions for correction and prevention will be taken. However there is a high chance that we have overlooked the real opportunity for improvement and which shows up as a blot in the customer feedback.  

4                     Is the customer party to the excellence process?

Another way to give a clear message to the organization is to involve customer as a partner in your Delivery Excellence process. There is a tendency in the organization to showcase only the end product to the customer and not the entire process. Many a times companies like to wow the customer or they do not want customer to understand the realities on the ground or companies want to continuously improve and keep most of the gains from improvement to themselves. Many times customers also will have their own Delivery Excellence processes and gives rise to conflict in terms of which framework to follow. If the corporation successfully sales the idea and benefits of the delivery framework it has and excites customer to participate in the same, be open with the customer about all the efforts teams are taking. This really gets the team pumped up as they see the importance of the framework and since customer is directly involved in to this, the WHY portion of the framework is addressed meaningfully giving a better chance to auto pilot the framework.

So if Senior management sponsors the delivery excellence framework and participates in to it actively coupled with appropriate implementation at middle management through a positive improvement oriented approach the chance for auto-piloting delivery excellence increases. If customer participates in using the delivery excellence framework then chances of auto piloting increase exponentially. 

Questioning – a sure shot way to Excellence

Let us look at the following quotes

• I think it's very important to have a feedback loop, where you're constantly thinking about what you've done and how you could be doing it better. I think that's the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself. (Elon Musk)
• Religion asks you to believe things without questioning, and technology and science always encourage you to ask hard questions and why it is important in science and technology. So I was always interested in science and technology. (Vinod Khosla)
• The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity (Albert Einstein)
• In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted (Bertrand Russell) 
• He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever Chinese Proverb
• Questioning is to thinking as yeast is to bread making.Questioning is what converts the stuff of thinking into something of value.( Jamie McKenzie)

If we read through quotes from some of the eminent persons mentioned above, It becomes clear that questioning is critical for enhancing our knowledge as said by many eminent personalities from all walks of life. Most of our scriptures as well as scientific works are actually answers to questions asked by some one. So a question comes to mind that can we use this technique of questioning to improve our level of excellence effectively? I think we can!  

As we know and discussed in previous blogs, “Excellence is the commitment one makes with one self to continuously do better than what one has done previously in the entire activities one performs on personal and professional life.  The benchmark is oneself and it is continuously moving upwards. There is not end as to final level of excellence”  

When we want to improve our level of excellence, we need to first identify what level we are in and what needs to be done to move to higher level, then execute them to reach to the higher level of excellence. We can actually use questioning for this purpose. If we question the “status quo” in our life and ask why for the same, we will get the answers to what we need to do to improve. Whenever we feel comfortable in doing a specific activity and feel that we have achieved all the things necessary to do this activity and consider ourselves as experts or we do not find difficulty in doing the specific activity; it is time for us to question ourselves to check what can be done to better the same, what would push us to the zone of uncomfortability for the next level. As soon as we feel comfortable and being human we prefer to be in the level of comfortability, we stop improving our excellence and as the time passes, we start falling down. So questioning oneself regularly and answering the questions by being truthful to oneself provides us the way to the next level of excellence.  It is very easy to question others but questioning oneself requires courage as one feels that everything one is doing is the right and best way of doing things. Even if we question ourselves, it requires further courage to answer them truthfully. We actually know what can be done to improve our level of excellence but either do not admit it or we are lazy to take those additional efforts and continue to use shortcuts which keeps us at lower levels of excellence. So questioning status Quo and answering it truthfully surely takes us to the next level of excellence. 

Organization with a Perpetual Positive Cycle of Excellence

We read a lot about Excellence at multiple levels like individual, team, organization, etc.; talk about facets that are important to bring about excellence within oneself or an organization; attend a lot of training courses on achieving personal excellence either in general or in specific areas like Sales, Customer relations, Production, Supply chain etc. Do we see the results that seemed to be possible after attending these sessions or reading those books? Most of the times, the answer would be NO. If we ponder over the reasons, one that comes up pretty frequently is that I do not have the right settings to implement these ideas, or I do not have complete buy-in for all these ideas across the organization, or something similar. So is there any way that we can create the organization which will help us breed excellence and nurture it so that it spreads across and grows continuously? Another thing comes to mind is that I am not at a powerful position in the organization to effect the change across so how do I bring this change? There is also a fear about acceptability of the concepts as well as outcomes of the change?

There are multiple ways to create such an organization and I will be discussing one of the ways in this article. However before that, let us deliberate a little on the fear of results as well as position in the organization hierarchy to effect the changes across the organization. Fear of results or fear of acceptability will be present whenever one tries to do some change from their present stable process be it on the organization side like changing the goods distribution mechanism or on personal side like changing from personal transport to public transport for commuting between home to office. One just needs to anticipate some possible outcomes other than the expected ones and prepare oneself to face the same. E.g. you may want to stock up the distribution depots sufficiently before switching to the new method so that even if something goes wrong, you will have some time to correct without giving any problems to business. It is also observed that this fear slowly comes down as one starts progressing on the path and achieves some milestones at desired pace so start slow, plan well and implement each step on the way meticulously. Keep the tab on results/reactions you are getting vis-a-vis expected and keep on tuning the change.

Any change an organization adopts, never adopted at organization as a whole. It is typically conceptualized, prototyped, finetuned, socialized and then implemented. So when you have some idea which you want to implement, it will be first implemented small so implement it in the small team which you might be leading; show case the result and take it to the organization level in step by step manner. The acceptability of change is more if it is backed by some results at multiple levels. So if you want to create an organization that breeds excellence and nurtures it, you may want to create this in a small team working in one area and then transmit the results as seed to other teams to build their organization on same principles which slowly rise to the organization level. So although it might take a longer time to implement this change than if you were a CEO of the company, it will surely get implemented as it is showing results.

When we are setting up the organization / team we need to look at following aspects along with the established principles of organization design and do the necessary changes so that we will get the team which breeds excellence and will allow us to sustain it over long period. These are;  

FOCUS: Every team needs a focus and the focus is typically provided by the leader of the team e.g. Project Manager provides focus to Project team and CEO provides focus to the organization. When the leader provides this focus, which ultimately translates in to goals of the members at various levels, “excellence” should be part of the same. Excellence is not a onetime activity but a continuous process; the messaging as well as expectations should clearly demonstrate the same. This focus really gets translated in to desired results if the focus of individuals matches with that of the leader. If the Team focus and Individual focus is different, then the results get diluted significantly. Hence it is critical for leaders to clearly state their focus towards excellence and demonstrate the same through their actions. It is also important to have interactions with the team at various levels regularly to check on the focus at various levels and make efforts to get as cohesive focus as possible.

FRAMEWORK: Best way to demonstrate the FOCUS is through framework which will be used by the team. So build a framework in such a manner that FOCUS is clearly visible to the team, through goals, objectives, mechanism of reporting & monitoring, metrics that would be used, etc. Create benchmarks for excellence levels in different areas of work; create incentives for achieving higher levels of excellence than benchmarks. The framework helps converting focus in to reality and is defined at two levels. First at level where, you define strategies or thoughts or policies or philosophies and the second at operations level where, you define actual procedures, approval mechanism, etc. It is critical to ensure that all the excellence tenets are included in definition of the FRAMEWORK that needs to be used to operate the organization and they are respected by everyone from top to bottom. One important part of FRAMEWORK is mechanism for reward and recognition; this is one of the critical point in terms of providing a push for “excellence behavior” seen in the associates. We need to craft this mechanism diligently in order to nurture excellence.

FLEXIBILITY: Flexibility is critical for breeding and nurturing Excellence. If the organization does not allow flexibility, it will not allow experimenting new ways to do things, it will not allow people to think out of the box, it will not allow people to fail and rise, it will not allow people to do better than what has been prescribed by the framework. The organization becomes rigid and does not encourage self-improvement. So the Framework when designed, we need to keep in mind that we do create it in such a manner that we encourage experimentation, we encourage associates to think differently and improve their level of excellence.   

   

FAITH: In the organization theory, it mentions of X & Y type of associates and various organizations are designed around the belief of management in the workforce attitude i.e. whether they believe the work force is predominantly X type or predominantly Y type. I believe that we need to set up the organization with a faith that associates really strive for excellence. With this FAITH in the team, we build our frameworks, and then chances are there that we will be able to create minimum hindrance organization. Off course, there will be exceptions and we will need to deal with them but we cannot strangulate the openness as well as flexibility which is built in the framework to foster Excellence Behavior for the sake of exceptions.

FUTURISTIC: Any organization when designed or any team which is formed is formed by keeping future in mind. The leaders predict the needs or the organization based on their vision for future and assessment of the current. The type of excellence traits that will be needed in near future as well as distant future needs to be identified and translated in to creating framework for the organization.

These five factors can be deliberated in much more detailed manner however it is clear that all the five factors are pretty interlinked and needs to be balanced on continuous basis. It becomes easy for the organization to implement these things if they have flexible IT systems supporting the framework. The robust IT backbone provides impetus to leaders to implement and demonstrate what they preach and it becomes transparent for the team that “excellence behavior” is recognized. The perpetual positive cycle of excellence sets in.